The workshop, Software Defined Network Interface, aims to increase the number of underrepresented minority Ph.D. students in computer science. The participants come from various universities including North Carolina State University and the University of Puerto Rico.

Prof. Hakim Weatherspoon, computer science, created the workshop because he said the percentage of underrepresented minorities in computer science was “very low.”

In fact, while between 1,500 and 1,600 students earn a Ph.D. in computer science each year, fewer than 3 percent of those students are underrepresented minorities, according to Weatherspoon.

“Each year there’s about 20, 25 that are African-American,” he said. “Around 20, 25 that are Hispanic, and 2 to 5 that are Native American. So about 50 total, which is less than 3 percent.”

“If we have 25 here,” Weatherspoon added about the program, “and then they all went on and pursued a Ph.D. and obtained one, we would have double the number of Ph.D.s that are from underrepresented minorities.”

The program — funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and Google — was free for participating students.

In the mornings, the students attended lectures from Cornell professors and deans from departments including computer science and engineering. After the morning lecture, students ventured around campus, visiting the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source and attending a campus tour. In the afternoon, students worked coding their research project.

“The focus of this workshop, research-wise, is computer networks,” Weatherspoon said. “They actually do a project related to computer networks.”

Weatherspoon described how there is a “pipeline” responsible for the low numbers of Ph.D. candidates from underrepresented minorities.

“If you go backwards from top down, one reason is there’s very few underrepresented minority faculty in computer science,” he said. “I’m the only one here at Cornell and across the nation, there’s very, very few. A lot of schools have zero, and some have one, and very few have two.”

In addition to “very few” minority students in Ph.D. programs, some of these Ph.D. graduates choose to enter the computer science industry instead of becoming faculty.

Weatherspoon explained that even before college, there are “not as many” underrepresented minority students choosing to enter STEM.

“What we see is a high interest in computer science, but then to get into a computer science program, especially at a top university, and make it all the way through, and then go onto a Ph.D., you’re just losing people the entire way,” Weatherspoon said.

Ato Watson, a junior at Florida Memorial University, participated in the workshop, describing the experience as an “eye-opener.”

“The workshop has been an eye-opener, being a student from an underrepresented minority institution, coming here, an Ivy League institution, where research is being done at an extensive scale,” Watson said.

“I’m one of those students where opportunities like this doesn’t present themsel[ves],” he added. “I’m an international student from Jamaica. This experience is new for me, so I’m trying my very best to learn as much as possible.”

Jaelin Jordan, a junior at Hampton University, also participated in the program. He described how the participants in the program brought varying skills and backgrounds to the group.

From these different skillsets, Jordan emphasized the value of collaboration in the computer science field because “the key to computer science,” he said, “is that there is never one solution; there’s multiple ways to solve a problem.”

Like Jordan, Maya Mundell ’14, a member of the workshop, praised collaboration among students, particularly in that the workshop’s participants came from around the world, including Egypt, Ethiopia and India.

“We all really enjoyed each other’s company and we all learned a lot from one another,” Mundell said. “I think that type of experience is extremely invaluable because now we all have friends that span the world pretty much. And we all came together with the common interest of tech education and tech career opportunities.”

“We saw an opportunity to promote data science in the undergraduate community, and we saw it as our responsibility as the data science project team to help make it happen,” said Chase Thomas ’19, CDS’s operations lead.

The course will be open to students of all majors who are interested in data science, according to Thomas. With no prerequisites and only one recommended course — Computer Science 1110: Introduction to Computing Using Python — the course is designed to be accessible to students with no prior programming experience.

Modeled on a similar training program offered by CUAppDev — another project team at Cornell — the course will be taught solely by undergraduate student lecturers. Daewon Kim ’17, president and education lead of CDS, said that he believes data science is a unique field where flexible, student-to-student instruction may be more effective than a regular course.

“The courses at school need to be fairly consistent and thus can’t closely follow the trends of the industry,” Kim said. “[CDS is] more sensitive to the industry standards because we’re not bound by the same constraints, and is in the right position to provide a more industry-sensitive introduction to data science.”

Developing the course posed a unique set of challenges for those working on the course material. Amit Mizrahi ’19, an education associate at CDS, said that one of these challenges was defining the students’ end goals.

“When we first started out, we asked ourselves: ‘What do we want this to be? How do we want the course to look?’ It’s a new approach and you have to have a well-defined vision to even start,” Mizrahi said.

Currently, the overarching goal of their course is to teach students data science from a practical standpoint as opposed to a mathematical, theoretical one.

“We want students to be coding from day one in the class, and we really want them to be engaging in a hands-on manner with what they’re learning,” Mizrahi said.

To achieve that goal, projects and assignments in this course will be modeled after industry cases and sample cases from competitions. Thomas said that by the end of the course, students will have a good feel for the real-world application of data science.

The eleven-week class will be offered as a one-credit course and meet every Wednesday in Gates Hall. Instruction will begin mid-February and end in April.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/01/24/cornell-data-science-launches-student-led-training-course-in-statistical-methods-programming-languages/feed/5Computer Science Growth a ‘Phenomenon’ at Cornellhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/09/18/computer-science-growth-a-phenomenon-cornell-university/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/09/18/computer-science-growth-a-phenomenon-cornell-university/#commentsMon, 19 Sep 2016 01:44:18 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=562303Nikita Gupta ’17 is a computer scientist who loves to cook. When she was a freshman in high school, she created a website so she could share her favorite recipes with friends and family.

Gupta uploaded videos of herself cooking onto a website and attached written recipes. She hadn’t been exposed to computer science before, but after working on the website, she decided she wanted to pursue the major in college.

“C.S. allowed me to integrate my passion for technology and cooking together, and create something that was helping my friends and family around the world,” she said.

Gupta has experienced firsthand the computer science craze sweeping through Cornell and across the country. In the last five years, the number of C.S. majors at Cornell has more than tripled — from under 200 to almost 700 — according to Prof. Fred Schneider, chair of the department of computer science.

The Computer Science Boom

The undergraduate demand for computer science is by no means a movement restricted to Cornell. “It’s a national phenomenon,” Schneider said. “Different universities have dealt with it in different ways.”

At the University of Washington, competitive applicants to the major need a GPA of at least 3.5 in C.S., math and English, he said, addressing the demands imposed by the major’s new popularity.

“So far we haven’t done those things, and I think the faculty would prefer not to do that,” Schneider said. “Cornell would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

He attributed part of the study’s attraction to its new demand and versatility in the job industry — computer science is useful in fields from finance to biology, and students know it’s “the new skill to have,” he said.

“The number of students who are not C.S. majors and want to take C.S. courses has grown significantly,” Schneider said.

Data Courtesy of Prof. Fred Schneider

Enrollment in computer science courses has increased along with the department’s number of undergraduate students.

This booming demand has had consequences, as Cornell has struggled to accommodate a swift increase in student interest in computer science. Enrollment in C.S. classes has doubled in the past five years, and the new popularity has relegated some computer science majors to waitlists when they try to enroll in desirable courses.

This semester, four high-level courses — out of the 27 the department is offering — have waitlists comprised entirely of computer science majors. In one course, 50 students are still hoping to enroll.

Schneider said this congestion is caused by restrictions in lecture hall sizes, and that professors would otherwise “be very happy” to teach larger versions of the courses.

“We’ve been asking for larger rooms, but the way the University does room scheduling has not allowed that,” he said.

To ensure that all C.S. majors can finish their graduation requirements in four years, the department uses a registration mechanism that prioritizes enrollment by year — senior majors have the first choice of classes, juniors have the second, and so on, Schneider said. Non-majors have the lowest enrollment priority, which can create additional waitlists of students who are not affiliated with the major but would still like to take courses.

“It’s virtually impossible if you’re a non-major to take a C.S. course,” he said. “And the department is not happy about this.”

Why Study Computer Science?

Students like Gupta said they chose C.S. for a variety of reasons, from academic interest to the field’s usefulness in multiple industries.

“I can go into fashion, I can go into food, I can go into social service, and I can go for the consumable hardware products.” — Nikita Gupta ’17

“The one thing that really excites me about computer science is that I can go into any industry and know that a software engineering role will be needed,” Gupta said. “I can go into fashion, I can go into food, I can go into social service, I can go for the consumable hardware products.”

Eric Landgrebe ’20 said he was drawn to computer science because he finds it intellectually stimulating.

“It’s unlike any other type of technical subject because it requires you to think about problems really generally and consider all the cases, instead of a math problem where you just can apply what you know and find the answer,” he said. “It has to be right all the time, not just in a particular case.”

Another factor in Landgrebe’s choice of major was that his C.S. degree will grant him a significant amount of job security, he said.

“It would be good for anything in tech, and also just anything that requires a lot of math and technical skills like investing,” he said.

Agi Csaki ’17, co-president of Women in Computing at Cornell, agreed with this assurance. Csaki began college as a math major, but switched to C.S. because she “wanted to be making an impact on people’s lives” — if she works in a large tech company, the code she writes could be used by billions of people, she said.

“After my first theoretical math class, I think that I felt like it was too far removed from the real world,” Csaki said. “I felt like in my computer science classes, I was applying everything that I loved about math, but it was really tangible the impact I was making on the world and on people.”

The Future of C.S. at Cornell

Computer science, as students study and apply it today, has only recently become established as a popular field, according to Csaki.

“More and more people are interacting with technology and with computer science,” she said. “I think that as kids are growing up interacting with that, it becomes more of a reasonable field to go into, rather than a while ago when tech seemed to be only for a very small select group of people.”

Prof. Éva Tardos, computer science, said students who were not C.S. majors first began to express interest in the classes around 15 years ago, after the “dot-com bust.”

“Having taken some computer science classes will make many students’ resumes look so much more powerful and interesting,” Tardos said. “The hunger for knowing more and more C.S. is increasing.”

Last year, in Tardos’s Introduction to Analysis of Algorithms course — an upper-level class required for the major — it was apparent that many of the students were non-majors, she said. Four hundred and twenty students had enrolled, and the graduating class of seniors only has 300 members.

Prof. Walker White, computer science, also said he has noticed an increase in interest in the topic within the College of Arts and Sciences. The major is currently offered in both Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering, and a similar growth spurt occurred in the engineering college in the 1990’s, he said.

“Being able to do some computing is definitely going to be super useful for a well-educated [adult] in the 21st century.” — Prof. Éva Tardos

“What we’re seeing that seems to be very ahistorical is a huge growth in Arts and Sciences,” White said. “We’ve always been a major that’s accessible through the Arts and Sciences, but for whatever reason, a small minority of our class comes from the Arts and Sciences.”

As the department expands its undergraduate reach, Tardos said she believes student interest will continue to grow, and not just for majors. She expressed her hope the University will hire more faculty members so that professors can teach smaller courses, and that the department will begin offering C.S. courses geared towards all students.

“There are many opportunities out there, not just in C.S. companies, but many other professions need people who can understand data and be able to do some computation with it,” Tardos said. “Being able to do some computing is definitely going to be super useful for a well-educated [adult] in the 21st century.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/09/18/computer-science-growth-a-phenomenon-cornell-university/feed/1SCHULMAN | “When a Wave Comes, Go Deep”http://cornellsun.com/2016/05/08/schulman-when-a-wave-comes-go-deep/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/05/08/schulman-when-a-wave-comes-go-deep/#respondSun, 08 May 2016 21:15:26 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=208822The future of journalism is murkier than Beebe lake this time of year. As a writer for the college paper, I’ve been thinking about this a lot (along with the rest of the folks here). I’ve also been considering this because journalism’s future hinges on two subjects I think about often: economics and computer science. My thoughts on the issue encapsulate two ideas I’ve been writing about all semester.

First, scarcity motivates so many of our daily decisions. Scarcity (or lack thereof) is the reason journalism’s future is uncertain. The floodgates are open to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Content used to be scarce, and now it isn’t. Journalists have a question they need to answer: why anyone would support content when so much is free?

The second thing I’ve been writing about is that people can’t treat technology like a black box. Journalists need to hear this and start using computers as tools to differentiate themselves. If you understand the machinery that powers the web — things like SQL, Python, Ruby, JavaScript and basic web design —you can design experiences that actually make you different.

Differentiating yourself among the sea of online content is not as simple as getting social media accounts, updating your website and posting videos and photo essays; platforms that my 16 year old brother uses will not differentiate you from the tsunami of free content on the internet. Everyone knows how to run a WordPress blog, upload photos to Instagram and post videos to YouTube; if things were this simple the conversation would be over.

If you want to stay relevant on the web, open a book on computer programming. Think about successful digital media. BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 as a viral lab tracking viral content and employs armies of engineers. Facebook is one of the biggest software companies in the country. Youtube is a subsidiary of Google. Medium was developed by ex-Twitter engineers. These companies spend a lot of money on software engineering to deliver a one of a kind experiences.

This is not a battle over writing — or even content. Journalists need to stop pretending it is.Nobody checks their newsfeed for hard hitting reporting, or carefully written insights. You check your newsfeed because the experience of scrolling through is like eating a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. Good writing is timeless. That will never change. But this isn’t about good writing.

All this to say, a website you didn’t build with some photo essays and video will not save your publication. I can’t tell you what will (if I did I would have millions of dollars in venture capital money). But, I’m confident you can figure it out. Writers are surprisingly creative. You just need the right tools. I should also say I’m optimistic. Writing is as much of a skill as computer science. (Most) computer scientists can’t write prose, but writers can learn to write code — trust me I did.

There’s a really good Humans of New York quote (that is just genuinely good advice) I think sums up my thoughts today and the semester as a whole:

“When a wave comes, go deep … There’s three things you can do when life sends a wave at you. You can run from it, but then it’s going to catch up and knock you down. You can also fall back on your ego and try to stand your ground, but then it’s still going to clobber you. Or you can use it as an opportunity to go deep, and transform yourself to match the circumstances. And that’s how you get through the wave.”

Computer science and the economics are the wave — you can either go deep or get knocked down. That’s my schtick and I’m sticking too it. Have some well earned fun on Slope Day, a productive finals week, and an amazing summer. Can’t wait to get back to The Hill next fall!

Eric Schulman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at eschulman@cornellsun.com. Schulman’s Schtick appears alternate Mondays this semester.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/05/08/schulman-when-a-wave-comes-go-deep/feed/0SCHULMAN | Sexism in Computer Science is Never Okayhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/04/24/schulman-sexism-in-computer-science-is-never-okay/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/04/24/schulman-sexism-in-computer-science-is-never-okay/#commentsSun, 24 Apr 2016 22:03:51 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=167968What I have to say isn’t novel or unique, but it is incredibly important: we need need to stop tolerating sexism in computer science and technology related fields. Like I said before, other people have written this (and have done a better job), but it’s time I stepped off the sidelines about something I see everyday that I find unequivocally wrong.

Computer science is unapologetically misogynistic. Some 70 to 80 percent of the field is men. That number has gone up over time, not down. There are fewer women in computer science than any other type of engineering and almost any other profession (I’m looking at you finance). Statistics can be skewed to match your agenda, but clearly computer science is doing something to scare away women. It’s pretty obvious what it is: sexism.

You hear horror story after horror story — the CEO of Microsoft telling an employee that she shouldn’t negotiate for equal pay in a Q&A (obviously, there’s more to this story; he apologized),female engineers getting harassed at tech conferences, etc. Obviously, no one wants to be sexist or support sexism yet nothing seems to be changing. Sometimes, people don’t even realize that they’re being sexist. There aren’t strong incentives that encourage people to be aware of their behavior or change things.

For these reasons, we need to have zero tolerance for discrimination. Computer science is a lot of fun. In my opinion, it will define the next century. It would be pretty awful if it remained as some exclusive bro-gramming club. We’re deterring a lot of people — a lot of smart people. Things need to change.

To be fair, much of this is out of our control. Sexism in computer science starts really early. For a while, personal computers were marketed to boys. Apparently, conventional wisdom holds that targeting boys or girls is more effective marketing (although I am very skeptical of this). Guys started dominating the field because they were being sold computers sooner. But, just because Apple’s marketing practices were sexist in the ’80s and ’90s doesn’t mean I have to be. Sexism needs to stop. It’s just wrong.

And yes, today this is changing; big proprietary software companies are spending a lot of money to immerse young women in programming sooner. But, it hasn’t changed yet. And, until it does we need to have zero tolerance for discrimination.

A lot of people defend sexism because they think it’s funny. I’m not going to comment whether things like things like C+= (a satirical feminist programming language made by hateful people with a lot of free time on their hands) and the old CS undergraduate group cover photo (which sparked a huge debate a few weeks ago), are funny. It doesn’t matter. They make people feel uncomfortable; they make me feel uncomfortable. Call me a buzzkill. I am a buzzkill. You don’t need to contribute to institutional sexism if you want to laugh. There are plenty of other funny things out there like 30 Rock, Stephen Colbert (before he sold out to CBS) or Scientology. Look at those things if you want to laugh.

And yes, women have succeeded and continue to succeed in computer science. I wouldn’t deserve my degree if I didn’t point out that despite everything stacked against them there are some pretty influential women in the field; I’ve been lucky enough to have some of them as teachers. But, looking at the demographics of their classes, you realize they are the exception to the rule. Either way, the fact that women can succeed and do in computer science doesn’t justify discriminating against them.

I’ll also be the first to admit that I am the last person who should be writing this. There are people who are better at computer science and people who are more involved with the community. I find computer science compelling, but not for its own sake. Answering economic questions with computer science is what really gets me going. I also started programming freshman year and was welcomed into the department. I’ve never had the mispleasure of being discriminated against in computer science.

But, I am a CS major and I write for the student newspaper. And it’s about time I said something considering this problem is so widespread and apathy only contributes to the problem. We have a system built against women succeeding. All this to say, we need to have zero tolerance for sexism in computer science (and, really just period). That’s my schtick this week. Stay tuned two weeks from now for my final column of the semester.

Eric Schulman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at eschulman@cornellsun.com. Schulman’s Schtick appears alternate Mondays this semester.

“Every time I teach, there have been certain revelations about basic things that people have seen all their lives about how computers work that they took for granted, and they never really quite understood,” Sirer said. “[At times during lecture,] I say, ‘Okay, this is how it’s actually done,’ and I love looking up at the crowd and I love seeing that moment — that revelation.”

One of the major areas of Sirer’s study is digital currencies, including Bitcoin and market transactions within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Sirer explained that Bitcoin is essentially “the virtual equivalent of gold.”

“There is a finite supply of it, it’s controlled — the rate at which you can extract it is limited,” Sirer said. “[It cannot] be manipulated by politicians. This is appealing to a lot of people.”

Bitcoin was previously thought to be an incentive-compatible system, where following the protocols of the Bitcoin marketplace would provide Bitcoin miners with the most profit, according to Sirer. However, two years ago Sirer jointly published a study describing an alternative method he found to mine Bitcoins that yields higher profits but goes against market protocols.

By withholding certain information about the market, certain miners can engage in “selfish mining” and profit at the expense of the other miners, according to Sirer. He added that these selfish miners grow bigger within the system by manipulating the system for their own profit.

“We should not have miners that are too big [in a Bitcoin system],” Sirer said. “They then become able to violate protocol on their own. Once we’ve discovered [selfish mining], it’s actually pretty useful because now you can [monitor] the health of a Bitcoin system by looking at how big the miners are.”

Despite this flaw, Sirer said he is still optimistic about the potential of Bitcoin for online transactions.

He added that one of his favorite features of Bitcoin is that it allows users to create self-enforcing monetary contracts where money is not dispersed until the conditions of the contract are fulfilled.

“There are a lot of aspects of human interaction where I think it would be nice to make programmatic, where money can change hands under automatically set conditions,” he said.

Sirer also emphasized his love for teaching — especially on the topic of operating systems — and demystifying the processes that operate under the hood of a computer.

“There are things that if you know how they work, they’re fairly straightforward,” Sirer said. “But most people don’t know how they work, and when we actually discuss these things, people go ‘ah, so that’s how it works.’”

Sirer said these “tricks” exist inside every operating system.

“This is what makes my machine tick, this is how it decides what to do, this is how it creates the illusion of concurrency,” he explained.

Sirer said he also encourages his students and anybody interested in computers to “get their hands dirty” and try things out, to build their own machines and write their own programs. He also stresses that it’s never too late to start in the field of computer science.

“I see a lot of people in our [computer science] program who worry that they come to Cornell and they’ve been exposed to computers for ‘only a few years’ or ‘much later than their friends,’” Sirer said. “And I have to break it down for them that it just doesn’t matter. You could pick this material up at age 18 [or] 20 and still be competitive.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/04/06/passionate-about-machines-prof-explains-online-currency-bitcoin/feed/2Panel Discusses Issues Facing Minorities in Computer Science Following Controversyhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/03/15/panel-discusses-women-minorities-in-computer-science/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/03/15/panel-discusses-women-minorities-in-computer-science/#commentsTue, 15 Mar 2016 06:10:18 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=79151Over 50 undergraduates, faculty members and graduate students called for institutional changes to address the lack of inclusiveness in Cornell’s computer science community at a discussion panel on Monday.

Students raised issues that ranged from elitism and condescension from the computer science undergraduate course staff to racial discrimination and the tone of online forums.

Female students shared several stories of times whenthey felt that their minority status in the field placed them at a disadvantage.

“When my friend first brought that up to me, she said I never talk in class, never, but I’m ‘that blonde girl,’ and I have had people recognize me wherever I go from class,” said Sarah Sinclair ’16.

Most instances of discrimination are small and unintentional, and women in computer science “silence [themselves] a lot of the time,” according to Sinclair.

“I have automatically started minimizing [my problems] — it’s not something I want to make a big battle out of,” Sinclair said. “There are all these little ways we make our feelings a non-issue, and I think that’s something that has been underlying this whole atmosphere.”

Yordanos Goshu ’18 suggested establishing a support group for underrepresented minorities as an initial step towards addressing racial discrimination.

“When a person in an underrepresented community fails and looks around and doesn’t see people of color, it doesn’t make them want to try again,” Goshu said.

Goshu said he would have struggled in the computer science major without mentorship from an African American graduate student.

“I [succeeded] because I reached out to someone and I had the confidence to do that,” Goshu said. “It’s really easy to get lost in a community when you look around everyone doesn’t look like you. If I didn’t have him as a mentor, there’s a good chance I would have been weeded out of the major. When you do fail, you need some support system.“

The discussion panel follows an online controversy that erupted in Cornell’s computer science community last week, when the department’s student-run Facebook page added a cover photo featuring only male, Caucasian professors, since 2013, when it was created.

Students who “felt very strongly” about the inequality in the photo published Facebook posts and medium.com articles arguing about bias against and exclusion of women in the computer science field, The Sun previously reported.

“The photograph was a stark reminder of the white male ‘bro-culture’ myth that women and other minorities in C.S. are struggling to change,” said Rachel Wells ’18, who wrote the first online response to the photo.

Some students expressed optimism that the department would see more equal representation in the coming years.

Prof.undergraduate Kavita Bala, computer science, said she expects that the department will see changes in its demographic in coming years, as more women are becoming interested in the tech industry.

“[The] major is undergoing a major transition at this point,” Bala said. “Three years from now, the public face of this major is going to look very different, and that is something we are all going to have to deal with together.”

A Facebook cover photo of computer science faculty featuring only Caucasian men has ignited a fierce debate over the discrimination that women face in computer science.

Rachel Wells ’18 wrote an angry post on the Cornell Computer Science Facebook group, saying she thought there was bias inherent in the cover photo, which was later changed to one that included female professors and people of color, according to Prof. Ross Tate, computer science.

“The photograph was a stark reminder of the white male ‘bro-culture’ myth that women and other minorities in C.S. are struggling to change,” Wells said. “All good intentions aside, the posting of the photograph was insensitive to many and obviously struck a nerve through the hearts of those in the community.”

Wells’ post sparked a flurry of passionate responses from other students. Rebecca Stambler ’16, who disagreed with Wells in an article on medium.com, said she thought the original photo was not intentionally exclusionary.

“It was an old photo, and I genuinely doubt that most people even noticed it or thought about changing it,” Stambler said. “If having a new photo makes people feel better in the C.S. community, I am all for it. I just disagreed with the manner in which the photo was changed.”

A group of 10 students who “felt very strongly” about stereotypes in Stambler’s article wrote a response on Google Docs, according to Agi Csaki ’17, co-president of Women in Computing at Cornell. Three authors, including Csaki, then compiled and condensed the information into an article.

“We did feel that there were a lot of common stereotypes and misconceptions about computer science that were being perpetuated by [Stambler’s] article,” Csaki said. “Things like saying that anyone has the right to say that women only get internships or jobs because they are women.”

The article contains a list of 31 supporters who contributed to the making of the document or agreed with the opinions expressed in it, according to Csaki.

Csaki said the co-written article aimed to provide a different perspective on the issues Stambler was discussing.

“Some women maybe have not faced discrimination and that’s awesome, but other women definitely do,” Csaki said. “We wanted to help give some women a voice who might not feel comfortable coming out in our community right now and saying ‘Yes, I have faced discrimination’ and ‘Yes, my confidence is something that I struggle with.’”

Randy Tung ’18, who created a satirical version of the updated group cover photo by adding a picture of him and his friend in the panel, called Wells’s post well-intentioned but unnecessary.

“First, her post included ad hominem attacks towards the overall computer science community,” Tung said. “Second, the change to the cover photo was unwarranted because the individuals in the original cover photo are some of the most prestigious professors in Cornell.”

The disagreement over the Facebook photo is part of a larger national debate about the status of women in computer science, as universities attempt to create environments that are more welcoming to women, according to Tate.

Women in Computing at Cornell, the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates at Cornell and the computer science department will co-host a discussion of women in computer science — moderated by Tate and Prof. Kavita Bala, computer science — on Monday, according to Csaki.

Csaki said WICC hopes that the Facebook discussions would calm down by creating a public debate. The forum will also be an opportunity for the computer science community to reflect on its current culture, according to Stambler.

“All of the responses and articles written have certainly opened our eyes to the variety of experiences people have in C.S.,” Stambler said. “Hopefully these discussions will help us gain more perspective and will leave C.S. a more welcoming environment for all.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misquoted Agi Csaki’s quote that Rebecca Stambler’s article ‘perpetrated’ instead of ‘perpetuated’ the misconceptions about computer science. Stambler was also misinterpreted as saying the forum will allow for re-evaluating its policies.